By: Tassia Dickenson
Guyana will soon boast a pathology lab that meets international standard, which will in turn modernise the local healthcare sector by significantly slashing the time patients wait for certain diagnoses.
During a recent broadcast programme, Advisor to the Minister of Health Dr Leslie Ramsammy disclosed that the pathology lab should be ready by October this year.
The programme is being developed with support from Mount Sinai and has a price tag of US$2M.
“If you are going to have a high quality cancer diagnostic service, if you’re going to have a transplant programme and for many diseases, you need to have a strong pathology lab,” Dr Ramsammy told this publication on Friday.
The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) currently offers pathology services; however, samples are usually sent overseas for testing – a process which can result in patients waiting for weeks to get their results.
“If we have to do a transplant, we need certain tests to be done. At the moment, we have to send abroad…it costs us a lot of money and then [there are] delays…,” Dr Ramsammy explained, as he described the importance of the investment into the modern pathology lab.
“Within three/four months, we should be able to procure the equipment and establish the lab and then work with our colleagues at Mount Sinai, to provide some of the technical support, like the interpretations and so on, because we don’t have…the pathologists to do this work, we have some, but we have to rely on others,” the health advisor noted.
“Our goal, is that we will engage both our pathologists in Guyana and abroad, in the US, in Canada, in the Caribbean, in India and in China, to help us with the interpretations. Once this lab is in place, we will not need to send any specimen abroad anymore, so that’s…where we are right now.”
For now, the lab will be located at the GPHC as authorities focus primarily on the getting the necessary equipment in place. But Dr Ramsammy revealed that the end goal is to house the lab in a separate building.
Meanwhile, training will soon begin to ensure locals can operate in the lab.
“With that lab, we would be one of the more modern pathology facilities…We don’t have the staff to support such a lab, so initially, four of our technicians will be trained in New York, at Mount Sinai. Two of them should be leaving the country in May, to be trained on how to process samples and so, and then two will go after the summer. We will also link our present pathologists with the pathologists at Mount Sinai, those pathologists are coming to Guyana, during the period of May/June to begin the training programmes,” Dr Ramsammy disclosed.
“In the case of the human resource, that we don’t have right now, we are going to have partnerships with other universities because now, they will be able to read the images that we have prepared in Guyana and so we would not have that problem of transporting the samples to another country.”
Specialists
Meanwhile, during the broadcast programme, Dr Ramsammy had pointed to the need for more specialist doctors in the country.
“We need more of our young doctors to be trained so we could send them to the regional hospitals. None of our hospitals should be without specialists. We certainly need to train more trauma specialists…whilst we have nine radiologists now, our imaging diagnostic specialists, we need more, nine is not sufficient,” he shared.
According to Dr Ramsammy, before 2006, the only specialists in Guyana were either foreigners or Guyanese who had been trained in London, Canada, or India.
“We had a handful of specialists only in this country. Since 2006 we introduced the post-graduate programme, right here in Guyana, and today we train our specialists in 18 different areas.”
Meanwhile, the health advisor said with the multi-billion-dollar Paediatric and Maternal Hospital in Goedverwagting, East Coast Demerara (ECD) coming, more specialised healthcare will be offered in-country.
“This should be a level five hospital…the highest level of tertiary care. It will have a cardiology department, with a CAT lab, it will have MRI [and] it will have an oncology department,” Dr Ramsammy said.
It is expected that the hospital will be completed in early 2025.
